Rumors of a renewed interest in CBS merging back with former corporate sibling Viacom have been floating about the entertainment industry for the past few months, with the latest round of merger discussions starting to hit the news back in January.

We’ve mostly stayed out of covering the rumors this time around, as the last time such speculation came up back in 2016, merger plans between the two corporations fizzled out — but today, Deadline Hollywood is reporting that CBS Corporation is ready to make an offer to buy Viacom, possibly ‘within days.’ If such an offer was accepted and approved, current CBS president Les Moonves would retain leadership of the merged companies.

APRIL 3 UPDATE: CBS has now made their offer to Viacom official.

This won’t be an easy negotiation, it seems, as CBS’s reported offer looks to be below Viacom’s current market value, a unusual ‘lowball’ offer to kick off the process.

Per Reuters’ additional reporting on the matter:

It is unusual for deal negotiations to start with the acquirer valuing its target at a discount. The fact that CBS’s first bid for Viacom infers such a valuation reflects how CBS views its position in the U.S. media landscape as superior to Viacom’s.

Deadline details how the financial sector is responding to the news:

Wall Street investors have quickly seized on the potential advantages of such a combination, which would bring together CBS’s top-rated broadcast network, with its prime-time lineup and sports programming, the premium cable channel Showtime and Viacom’s two dozen cable channels and Paramount Pictures studio.

Many of those who take the optimistic view of Viacom have recommended a premium of between 10% and 30% over its current value, making the below-market opening offer a little more sobering of a starting point.

A bulked-up CBS-Viacom would have the financial wherewithal to bid for increasingly expensive sports rights, and gain leverage in negotiations with TV distributors, both traditional pay TV providers as well as with online streaming services that are gaining popularity with viewers.

This is a big deal for Star Trek fans, of course, as we’ve spent the last decade-plus watching Trek develop under two separate corporate owners — CBS maintains control over all Trek television development, as well as the past fifty years of Star Trek television programming, while Paramount Pictures (owned by Viacom) retained control over the Trek film properties, including the first ten features and the three Kelvin Timeline movies.

Back in 2016, Moonves cleared up a long-standing rumor about Trek competition between the two corporations, explaining that the then-untitled Star Trek: Discovery series, contractually, could not debut until at least six months after Paramount’s Star Trek Beyond film was in theaters.

When [CBS] split from Viacom ten years ago, January 1, 2006, one of the big sticking points, as you can imagine, was “Star Trek.” You know, we both wanted it.

They said “It’s a movie!” and I said, “No, no, no, it’s a TV show.” Actually, we’re both right. So they kept the feature film rights, we kept the television rights; they have [“Star Trek Beyond”] coming out July 22.

Our deal with them is that we had to wait six months after their film is launched so there wouldn’t be a confusion in the marketplace.

This split also impacts the lack of crossover elements — aside from minor dialog or prop-based references — between the two companies’ Trek holdings; as Star Trek: Discovery writer Erika Lippoldt told The Alpha Quadrant podcast (via TrekMovie):

Just because of the rights issue, we can’t use anything from the films, so that’s just something that we’re always aware of.

ALL films, ’cause it’s a Paramount property, not CBS.

Corporate mergers are all the rage in the entertainment industry, as behemoths Disney and 21st Century Fox are in the process of a large-scale consolidation, and CBS and Viacom certainly are two halves that might make a more well-suited whole.

Now that it looks like things are really getting real between the two companies, we’ll be sure to bring you the latest news as it breaks on this ongoing story.